The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

What do you get from Severed: Forest of the Dead? Apart from starring the guy who plays President Roslin’s assistant on the new Battlestar Galactica, a fairly novel setting for a zombie movie (the forest!) and a new origin idea, not a whole lot. And even the novelties come with pretty severe caveats. The zombies here are created when genetically modified tree sap comes into contact with an open wound. It’s a fairly original but wholly retarded plot device. Explanations are overrated anyway. The lumberjack setting allows for a couple of creative, albeit barely shown, death scenes and it ends up feeling like a tease.  Once you get past the novel premise and setting and the familiar face what you’ll find is an uninspired, pedestrian zombie movie. The acting, direction and script are all mediocre, and the ending is pretty lame. It does manage to be moderately entertaining for its run time but it feels a lot like treading water. I mean, I don’t expect every zombie movie I see to blow me away, but it’s nice if they throw me a little bone here and there. This one simply didn’t and I was really disappointed they didn’t take better advantage of all those axes, chainsaws and wood chippers that were just begging to be used. Overall, not terrible, but not special.

In my ongoing research into the origins and history of the zombie in fiction, I came across this interesting article on the earliest zombie stories in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. It turns out some pretty well-known pulp authors, including Robert E. Howard (of Conan fame)  and  Clark Ashton Smith, contributed some early ink to the zombie mythos. As far back as 1939 descriptions such as, “Above the man’s left temple, amid the grey-flecked hair, jagged splinters of bone gleamed through torn and discoloured flesh! And a grayish ribbon of brain-stuff hung down beside the man’s left ear!” (from a Thorp McCluskey story called “While Zombies Walked”), which would ring true to any modern zombie fan, were appearing in pulps. It’a an interesting read and it managed to add a stack of odds and ends to my ever-growing reading list. Hopefully I can track some of this stuff down…

In Night of the Comet a mysterious comet reduces nearly all of the planet’s population to a fine, red dust. Many of the survivors are turned into crazed zombies who chase and try to eat the unchanged. And there’s some mad scientists who want to use the unaffected to create a cure and save themselves. Facing off against these evil scientists are two sisters (one a cheerleader, of course) and a truck driver who will look familiar to fans of Star Trek: Voyager. It’s fairly lightweight and pretty dumb, but it’s also a lot of fun. The zombie makeup was excellent, but there are not nearly enough zombies in the film.

I have to admit to a fair bit of nostalgia for this movie. I must have watched it a dozen times as a kid, thanks to the miracle of cable TV. It’s clearly influenced by Romero, but it isn’t really a zombie movie — more like an apocalyptic sci-fi movie with a few zombies thrown in. Still, some of my adult fascination with zombies has to stem from the deep imprint this movie left on me as an adolescent.  And hey, zombies + apocalypse + ’80s = a good time in my book! If I didn’t have the nostalgia, this would probably warrant a lukewarm positive response. But I do, so I really enjoyed it.

What is a zombie? It’s an obvious and necessary question for any blog that seeks to cover the wide variety of zombie media. In my research and writing, I’ve encountered a number of different definitions for what is or isn’t a zombie. It’s something that really, really seems to get zombie lovers riled up. If you want to see an example, check out the discussion page for the Wikipedia list of zombie movies (it’s in my blogroll links). It has pages of discussion over 28 Days Later, much of it which can only be described as frenzied.

Many people take what I feel is a ridiculously narrow view. In a list of the best zombie movies of all time I wrote a while back, some of the commenters complained that The Serpent and the Rainbow didn’t belong. Another commenter said if it wasn’t an ambulatory, flesh-eating corpse, it wasn’t a zombie (in other words, it’s a Romero clone, or it’s not a zombie). That’s just ridiculous. For one thing, it makes the list of zombie movies and media about a ten percent of what it actually is, or should be. For another, it completely ignores the history and development of the zombie. Worst, it completely excludes some of the coolest zombies of all time.

Personally, I take an expansive, inclusive position on what is or isn’t a zombie. I use what I consider a common-sense approach: if it looks like a zombie, acts like a zombie and/or is called a zombie, then it’s (probably) a zombie. I know that might seem like a circular argument, but we are talking about a largely fictional creature here — a zombie is what the people who make zombie media say it is, and, to a lesser degree, what the people who experience that media think it is.

It’s not quite that simple; there are other considerations. For starters, it’s definitely worth noting that zombies are, in one incarnation, a real thing. You can’t say that about too many other monsters! The first zombie stories came from reports of Westerners who visited Haiti and witnessed or heard about the creations of Voudon practitioners. From there, zombies were incorporated into film and theater, then later books, video games, etc.

On the other hand, things that are clearly and definitively something else, such as vampires, demons or ghosts, are not zombies (although there are some special cases that might qualify as zombie hybrids).  These creatures have their own traditions and tropes associated with them. Trying to encompass them in the definition of a zombie simply dilutes the definition beyond usefulness.

That’s the basic premise: if it looks like a zombie, acts like a zombie and/or is called a zombie (i.e. is based on the reality of the Voudon practice of zombification or any of the fiction inspired by that practice) and isn’t something else, it’s a zombie. I’m not done with this topic, not by a long shot. I’m actually working on a super-scientific method for determining zombieness and I intend to address several specific characteristics of zombiism in later posts, but I think I’ve poked the fire enough for one day.

The legendary Joe Dante takes on zombies in Homecoming, his entry in the Masters of Horror anthology. Overall he acquits himself well. It looks nice, the acting is solid and everything moves along at a nice clip. The story covers a group of zombie soldiers that return from the grave to express their opinion on the unpopular war that killed them (hint: they aren’t too fond of it). As well execuuted as this was overall, I really felt that it got bogged down by its politics. It’s so heavy handed in its approach to its message that it distracts from the experience of watching it, even if you more or less agree with its position (although some parts of it work precisely because they are so blatantly taking aim at some political hack, such as the scene where the Ann Coulter-esque character takes a bullet to the head — that worked great for me). I watched it for the first time recently and I wonder if I would have liked it more if I’d seen it right after it came out in 2005. I’ll watch it again in five years and see if I feel the same way – this one may actually be easier to swallow when what it is commenting on isn’t in that weird, not-so-fresh gray area between current events and history. After all, the idea of soldiers returning from the grave to express displeasure with the way they were used is an essentially timeless idea.

The gutless Wicked Little Things is representative of a disturbing trend in horror over the past six to eight years, toward generic, slick and soulless genre exercises. It features mediocre, if generally competent, acting, combined with stiff, pedantic direction, a questionable script and just enough gore to slip under the censor bar while throwing a bone to gore-hound fans. The plot of this stinker seems to have been generated by writing various horror movie tropes on cards, shuffling the deck, then dealing out half a dozen cards and calling it a story. This one got flesh-eating zombies, scary-ass dead kids, single mom moves to small town with a secret, possibly imaginary friend, revenge haunting and running in the woods. It does remarkably little with that haphazard collection of ideas. It is probably a tad better than Mortuary, another film that is representative of the same trend. Still, a tad better than utterly atrocious is still fucking miserable.

I know when you’re reading this blog, you’re thinking, “This is all fascinating, riveting stuff, but what does this guy look like? More importantly, what would he look like as a zombie?” Well now, thanks to my loving and ever-creative better half and the artistry of Rob Sacchetto of Zombie Daily, you know. I received a lovely, hand-drawn version of the image you see here for my birthday Saturday and knew I just had to share it with you fine people. If you like it as much as I do, you can get one of your own done by Rob by visiting the link above, or hitting his other, portrait-specific site Zombie Portraits. He’s also got some t-shirts and coffee mugs and what not, if you like that sort of thing.